I am looking at(taking the courses now) possibly getting back into trading using the Trend Catcher system, more than likely scalping. I’m thinking I would probably be looking at CL, eventually adding more as I progress. I have traded alot with Nadex and a little bit of Forex with an offshore broker(through MT4), but futures are new to me. All I’ve learned is from watching my dad trade the s&p500. I know that each tick is worth a certain value, but am not familiar with the margin/account requirements. What is a realistic account size to start trading oil futures? Is $1000 enough to start, or should I be looking to start with more? I know I saw intra-day margin was $1k through AMP, does that mean if I was to go under $1k in my account I couldn’t open another position? I know you can do more contracts, I’m guessing there is a certain margin per contract opened? Also, I can’t seem to find it, but what is the charge for data through AMP? I remember there used to be something about opening an account with $500 and then you got data free, but that was over a year ago. Just trying to set myself up for success and see realistically what I would need to trade futures.
Considering futures account, know very little about it
$1000 is NOT enough to trade CL. Margin for one Crude Oil contract is $1,000 and most brokers require to have the required day trading margin plus a little more. And yes if you were to only have 1K in your account and you lost the first trade you would not be able to open another trade unless you had the required margin. You have to put down $1000 for every CL contract. So if you want to trade 1 contract you put down 1k. If you want to trade 5 contracts you put down 5K.
5k is good to start trading CL. I started with 3K-4K.
When it comes to an account size I encourage people to put as much money in the account that you can afford to risk. Usually the less money one has the more they end up trading from a scarcity mindset. Taking profits to early, losing confidence and not executing trades when the set up appears is usually a result of losing a few trades with a small account. Seeing your account depleted so fast can put you in a state of being desperate. And you do NOT want to trade from that perspective. Sometimes the day may start out with a few losers and depending on your stop losses you can be down 400-500 with a few losers and if you only have 1K you could be down 40%-50%.
Personally I don’t find anything wrong with aggressive trading. But being mentally stable is KEY to do something like that. There are intraday swings in P&L that you have to deal with and if you can’t deal with that mentally try to get more money in your account. Being down $500 on a $5,000 account is different from being down $500 on a $1,000 account.
AMP now charges $15 bucks a month basically for Data. This $15 bucks a month is something new they are doing.
Amp only requires 500 to open there acount and from I what I saw in my Dashboard the three YM, NQ, ES all now require only 300 to day trade during margin.
Thank you guys for the replies. I just wanted to make sure I wasn’t starting behind the 8 ball, and I want to be able to take the draw downs and keep moving forward. I’ll have to look into possibly the ES then. Thankfully I’m in a position where it’s not hard to build capitol, I just want to make sure I start out with a “good” amount. I had traded the P3 signals before with too small of an account and it was too easy to second guess trades and wipe out an account. Back to watching the videos/reading the posts until I have a comfortable amount of capitol.
The $15 is a imposed fee by the CME not AMP.
You may want to look into forex data is free and you can trade with a tick value of .10 and $1.00 or larger so its better for small accounts than futures.